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Featured in Development

As part of our core values of sharing knowledge, the InfoQ editors were keen to capture and share our book and article recommendations for 2018, so that others can benefit from this too. In this second part we are sharing the final batch of recommendations

Featured in Architecture & Design

Tanya Reilly discusses her research into how the fire code evolved in New York and draws on some of the parallels she sees in software. Along the way, she discusses what it means to be an SRE, what effective aspects of the role might look like, and her opinions on what we as an industry should be doing to prevent disasters.

Featured in Culture & Methods

Mik Kersten has published a book, Project to Product, in which he describes a framework for delivering products in the age of software. Drawing on research and experience with many organisations across a wide range of industries, he presents the Flow Framework™ as a way for organisations to adapt their product delivery to the speed of the market.

Featured in DevOps

The fact that machine learning development focuses on hyperparameter tuning and data pipelines does not mean that we need to reinvent the wheel or look for a completely new way. According to Thiago de Faria, DevOps lays a strong foundation: culture change to support experimentation, continuous evaluation, sharing, abstraction layers, observability, and working in products and services.

News

Java developers have long been able to use SonarQube to measure and analylize their code base for technical debt. Now C# developers using can benefit from this tool thanks to its improved cooperation with Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server.

Historically working with BizTalk has been overly difficult. Once you get past very simple scenarios, the learning curve for BizTalk was so steep that most developers didn’t even bother trying. They would either hack something together or just skip BizTalk entirely and just use purely custom code. Azure App Logic seeks to correct this problem with a new approach.

Historically, creating universal or “run anywhere” applications meant restricting yourself to the lowest common denominator. New features can’t be used until all devices support it, which may be never depending on your customer base. In the Windows 10 vision, that isn’t going to be the case.

While there were rumors that Microsoft would be adopting Android for the Windows 10 platform, no one expected the announcement that iOS applications would also be adopted. This is made possible, by combining C2 with Clang.

Most developers don’t know much about C2, but it is a vital part of the Windows development lifecycle. It acts as the backend compiler for Visual C++, .NET natively compiled code, compiled T-SQL, and Objective-C on Windows.

Microsoft has completely rewritten the build server in Team Foundation Server and Visual Studio Online. The new tool completely eliminates the massive XAML-based Windows Workflow files that were used as build definitions.

A major focus of Build 2015 is Office 365 as a platform. The desktop version of Office has been treated as a development platform since the early days of macros written in a variant of BASIC. Microsoft intends to recreate and expand upon that by turning Office 365 into a cross platform development platform available on any form factor or operating system.

Universal XAML isn’t just an application UI toolkit, it is being used throughout Windows 10 for OS programs. As such, cross-platform consistency and performance are of upmost concern. To address this, new features such as compile-time data binding has been added.

Depending on who you ask, IoT is something brand new and revolutionary or just a natural progression of what we’ve been doing for decades. The truth is somewhere in the middle; consumer devices replacing the simplistic, mass produced sensors and expensive aviation-grade components. With this in mind, Kevin Miller of Microsoft offers these basic guidelines for starting an IoT project.